Conventionally, wine racks are used in wine cellars or other wine storage areas to store numerous bottles of wine in a desired area. In such conventional wine racks, the bottles of wine are supported along the length of the bottle within a grid of generally rectangular cavities stacked upon and next to each other, each rectangular cavity typically formed by pairs of parallel wood supports held in position by front and rear frame structures.
These wine racks are generally solidly built wooden structures, and the cavities are capable of storing one or more bottles of wine vertically stacked on top of each other. Thus, the nature of these types of wine racks generally results in the bottles being stored in close proximity to each other, preventing air circulation around the individual bottles and providing inadequate measures for securing the wine bottles in the event the rack is bumped, jostled or otherwise moves. Therefore, wine bottles may fall off the rack resulting in loss of the product and a significant mess to clean.
Also, in this example of a conventional wine rack, the wine rack is typically configured such that user places a bottle of wine longitudinally within one of the rectangular cavities such that when the rack is full of wine bottles, only the top ends (i.e., where the foil is wrapped around the top end) of the wine bottles are generally visible when viewing the wine rack—and the labels on the wine bottle are not generally visible by the user. As such, in order to determine which type of wine (e.g., varietals/grape type, winery name, vintage/year, etc.) is stored in a particular cavity of such a wine rack, the user may need to remove the bottle from the wine rack in order to view the label on the bottle.
It is, against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.